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MatheMUSEments
Poe's Secrets
By Ivars Peterson
Muse, January 2002, p. 44.
The writer Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his scary stories and
poems, but he also loved secret messages. His mystery story
"The Gold-Bug" is about a secret message written in
invisible ink on a scrap of parchment. The deciphered message
leads to a buried chest filled with fabulous treasure.
Here's the coded message that Poe included in his story:
53++!305))6*;4826)4+.)4+);8
06*;48!8`60))85;]8*:+*8!83(8
8)5*!;46(;88*96*?;8)*+(;485);
5*!2:*+(;4956*2(5*–4)8`8*;
4069285);)6!8)4++;1(+9;48081;8:
8+1;48!85;4)485!528806*81(+9;48
;(88;4(+?34;48)4+;161;:188;+?;
It looks like a crazy math equation! How would
you go about solving the puzzle?
The clever treasure seeker in "The Gold-Bug,"
William Legrand, assumed that symbols stood for letters of the
alphabet, with no spaces left between the words of the message.
He noticed that the character "8" appears 33 times, far
more often than any other character. In the English language, the
letter that occurs most often is "e." Starting with
that clue, he went on to look for combinations of three
characters that might represent "the"—a very
common word in English. Legrand could then guess that the
semicolon represents "t" and 4 represents "h."
Following such hints, Legrand deciphered the
secret message (see end). Clues contained in the mysterious
message eventually led him to a fortune in gold and jewels.
For a short time, Poe was also editor of a
magazine. In a contest that lasted six months, he invited his
readers to submit coded messages that they thought would stump
him. Poe then published two puzzles of his own and challenged
readers to solve them. The puzzles were so hard that the first
one wasn't solved until 1992, and the second one wasn't solved
until 2000—and then only with the help of computers.
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Poe's first puzzle |
The second message was tough to decipher because
it used several different symbols for each letter. Moreover, the
number of symbols for a given letter depended on how often that
letter appears in English text. For example, there were fourteen
symbols standing for "e" and just two symbols standing
for "z."
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Poe's second puzzle |
Poe would have been delighted to know how long he
had managed to mystify his readers!
What the Gold-Bug Message Said
A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the
devil's seat twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast by
north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye
of the death's-head a bee line from the tree through the shot
fifty feet out.
Roughly translated, the message means that if you
sat in a scooped out hollow in a rock formation called the
Bessop's Castle and looked northeast through a telescope you
would see something in a distant tree. This turned out to be a
skull nailed to the tree's seventh limb. Dropping a weight
through one eye socket of the skull marked a point on the ground.
If you drew a line through that point starting at the tree trunk,
you'd find the treasure 50 feet away from the tree along that
line.
Poe's magazine puzzles are deciphered at http://www.bokler.com/eapoe.html.
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